The Amboy Dukes comes as a sensational shock: was there really a time, not so many years ago, when Jewish teenagers lurked on the streets of Brooklyn, armed with knives, brass knuckles, and homemade pistols, and terrorized each other and the law-abiding citizens around them? Picture Boyz ‘n the Hood, except everyone’s named Goldfarb, Bronstein, or Sachs, and they’re still young enough to fit into their bar mitzvah suits.

It sounds ridiculous, and Shulman undoubtedly exaggerates a little, but the world of The Amboy Dukes isn’t total fantasy. During WWII, as parents worked overtime and older boys fought overseas, sixteen-year-olds could swagger through their tough neighborhoods and, in some cases, get themselves into serious trouble. Frank Goldfarb, the protagonist of Shulman’s novel, isn’t the most violent or unbalanced member of his gang, the titular Dukes: he isn’t the one who suggests that the boys steal back the money they’ve paid to a prostitute who has serviced each of them in turn, and he isn’t the one who stabs an innocent Puerto Rican on a whim. He contents himself with smoking “reefers” and making time with the neighborhood’s loose girls, one of whom is only twelve years old. Thanks to his buddies, though, Frank has soon graduated from such petty crimes to being accessory to a capital offense, and despite his desire to be a supportive brother to his lonely sister Alice, and a couple brief flirtations with reform in the form of basketball at the local JCC, his fate looms, sordid and grim.

Though hardly subtle, Shulman’s prose is taut and compelling, and he has a remarkable eye for details of dress, architecture, and other cultural artifacts. The novel’s immediate aim, of course, was sociological; Shulman insistently points out the ways that problems in the schools, in labor conditions, and in the real estate market exacerbate the natural wayward tendencies of youth. Though he is more famous for writing the screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the impact of The Amboy Dukes, Shulman’s first novel, was hardly insignificant: it sold more than four million copies in paperback. Strangely, though, the paperback copies aren’t quite the same book; every last trace of Jewishness—copious Yiddishisms, all of the Jewish names, references to kosher meat and Passover—was excised from them, and from the film adaptation of the novel, titled City Across the River (1949). This odd transformation was noted by Henry Popkin in a classic 1952 Commentary article; Popkin wondered why these edits were deemed necessary, as Shulman’s book “says no more than that the Jews, like other groups in America, have the problem of juvenile delinquency.” What Popkin may not have realized is that within a few decades, after demographics and stereotypes had shifted, Shulman’s association of Jewish teens with gang activity would come to seem utterly unbelievable.